Re: [Discuss] Home server
On 1/26/2015 12:59 AM, Joe Polcari wrote: FreeNAS is all of that and built for storage and file sharing with a web interface. FreeNAS runs as an embedded OS. You don't install it; you dump the image to a USB flash drive and boot from that. Very simple to deploy, much pain to install security updates. PC-BSD and TrueOS are full installations like vanilla FreeBSD. More work to install, less hassle to update. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
Automatic updates - well checking, it still requires you to say 'do it'. -Original Message- From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+joe=polcari@blu.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pieri Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 10:30 AM To: discuss@blu.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] Home server On 1/26/2015 12:59 AM, Joe Polcari wrote: FreeNAS is all of that and built for storage and file sharing with a web interface. FreeNAS runs as an embedded OS. You don't install it; you dump the image to a USB flash drive and boot from that. Very simple to deploy, much pain to install security updates. PC-BSD and TrueOS are full installations like vanilla FreeBSD. More work to install, less hassle to update. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On January 25, 2015, Rohan Joshi wrote: I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and documents, preferably one that is scheduled. If you don't mind spending money, I recommend the Synology Diskserver line. (It's Linux under the hood.) Been happy with ours for years. It has a simple GUI and is pretty much set and forget. Just insert 5 disks, let it set up the RAID for you, then create a backup volume, and done. It also works as a TimeMachine server and SMB server for your other OSes at home. It also comes with software packages for managing a photo collection, running a home monitoring system, and other stuff. Sure, you could do the same thing with any Linux server. The advantage with Synology is its simplicity. I have a model DS1511+. -- Dan Barrett dbarr...@blazemonger.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
BTW, running an image is an option. You can also do an install to a dedicated drive/SSD as well. Smallest you can find, so cheap, as long as you can set your system to boot from it. -Original Message- From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+joe=polcari@blu.org] On Behalf Of Joe Polcari Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 11:54 AM To: 'Richard Pieri'; discuss@blu.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] Home server Automatic updates - well checking, it still requires you to say 'do it'. -Original Message- From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+joe=polcari@blu.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pieri Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 10:30 AM To: discuss@blu.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] Home server On 1/26/2015 12:59 AM, Joe Polcari wrote: FreeNAS is all of that and built for storage and file sharing with a web interface. FreeNAS runs as an embedded OS. You don't install it; you dump the image to a USB flash drive and boot from that. Very simple to deploy, much pain to install security updates. PC-BSD and TrueOS are full installations like vanilla FreeBSD. More work to install, less hassle to update. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On 1/26/2015 4:05 PM, Joe Polcari wrote: I have quite a few FreeNAS boxes in service right now and that is not how they work. Hm. Probably a change some time between FreeNAS 7, which is built on top of m0n0wall (more or less), and the more recent versions. That would go a long way to explain FreeNAS 9's relatively huge RAM requirements. I stopped paying much attention to FreeNAS when version 8 was released. It was a huge downgrade in capabilities and features from version 7. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
I have quite a few FreeNAS boxes in service right now and that is not how they work. -Original Message- From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+joe=polcari@blu.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pieri Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 2:57 PM To: discuss@blu.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] Home server On 1/26/2015 11:54 AM, Joe Polcari wrote: Automatic updates - well checking, it still requires you to say 'doit'. Look deeper: FreeNAS runs from images. When you update FreeNAS you download a new image and that image is added to the boot loader. Installing FreeNAS to a fixed drive entails using another host to install the image to the drive and then moving the drive to the FreeNAS host. Upgrades are done the same way: remove the drive, install a new image, return it. Pain in the behind and a waste of a perfectly good SSD that would be better used for ZIL. One way to look at the difference between FreeNAS and PC-BSD is Android vs. Ubuntu. Similar idea: FreeNAS and PC-BSD share the same kernel and user space but in practice the former is a file service appliance while the latter is a full-on computing system. NB for Rohan: FreeNAS has a recommended minimum of 8GB RAM. PC-BSD has a more modest 1GB minimum with 2-4GB recommended. If the system supports two DDR2 sticks then I strongly recommend upgrading to 4GB at the least regardless of what you run on it. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
Rohan Joshi rohan2...@gmail.com queried: I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and documents, preferably one that is scheduled. Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. Wow, this has already been analyzed to death...amazing number of replies. Building a home server really doesn't require much thought regarding the distro: I like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE but if you prefer something else, just about any distro will do. You're relying on core Linux (I'm presuming Linux because you posted to BLU) kernel capabilities for most of this, plus a handful of basic packages available on any distro. The technologies I use take the idea of a home server and go well beyond. Here's some of what I have set up: * LVM - create a pool of your physical media, and allocate filesystems out of this pool; then when you run out of storage on any volume, you have the choice of cleaning up stale stuff or adding more space. * Software RAID - makes it easy to add more hard drives when you need them, or to swap out failed drives. I prefer software RAID because with modern CPUs (or even older ones like yours) you don't take a performance hit and you can easily set up monitoring so it emails you if a drive fails. * Nagios - for monitoring everything * LUKS encryption - to keep the thieves out * Samba - for sharing with Windows and OS X * GlusterFS - for clustering 2 or more servers (this one is hard to learn and only works well for volumes with small numbers of files) * CrashPlan - for backups * rsnapshot - secondary tool for backups (I always back things up two different ways so one mistake or misconfiguration can't wipe out the backups) * UPS - keep everything on battery * Raspberry Pi - a bastion-host firewall so the home servers aren't directly mapped to external IPs but I can still ssh in if I need to. * haproxy - load-balancing for software packages that can use more than one server * virtualbox and LXC - software virtualization / containerization to keep apps away from the fileservers (so I can upgrade software more easily, and so intruders have a harder time compromising things) I think the bare-minimum essentials are: the UPS, CrashPlan, LVM, and Samba. The rest are bells-and-whistles. -rich ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 05:14:08PM -0500, Richard Pieri wrote: On 1/26/2015 4:05 PM, Joe Polcari wrote: I have quite a few FreeNAS boxes in service right now and that is not how they work. Hm. Probably a change some time between FreeNAS 7, which is built on top of m0n0wall (more or less), and the more recent versions. That would go a long way to explain FreeNAS 9's relatively huge RAM requirements. I stopped paying much attention to FreeNAS when version 8 was released. It was a huge downgrade in capabilities and features from version 7. Recent versions are built on Django. They say that the larger RAM requirements come from ZFS itself, which apparently likes lots of RAM for performance reasons, but maybe it is also Django--I don't know. Version 8 was a big downgrade in features, but as of 8.2 it was back on par with version 0.7 features via their plugin system using PBIs in FreeBSD jails. 9.3 just came out and it apparently does package-level updates with delta support. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Tom Metro tmetro+...@gmail.com wrote: I'd like to find a hardware/software setup that is optimized for backup storage, rather than performance and redundancy. For example, a hardware solution that allows attaching lots of hard drives, and hot-swapping them. Software that treats hard drives as removable cartridges, remembering what is stored on what disk. Similar to tape management, but modernized for hard drives. That sounds like a system I started to design and build years ago. It would also do HSM. To bad my 'black hole of data' system never got completed. Back in CP/M days I had a system that would track contents and meta-data about files stored on disks, but have never found one since. As drives get bigger programs and users just 'expect it to all be there all the time', but I don't find that to be necessary most of the time. ... Oh well. ... I too would like a system that you described above. -- ... Jack Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart... Colossians 3:23 Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new. - Albert Einstein You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people. - Admiral Grace Hopper, USN Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. - Ben Franklin ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On 1/26/2015 6:46 PM, Tom Metro wrote: That's what I've heard as well. Apparently ECC RAM is also highly recommended. ZFS makes extensive use of RAM for cache. You don't actually need it for small scale use. I ran it just fine with Debian + ZFS on Linux on a 2GB system. I switched to Btrfs because keeping up to date with ZFS on Linux on Debian was tedious at the time. It's since gotten much better but I'd still go with FreeBSD for ZFS. Having the file system supported in the kernel is a whole lot better than dealing with third party repositories. ECC is mandatory if you want to ensure end to end error detection and correction. If you only care about on-disk bit rot then you can get by with non-ECC. Other options to consider: http://www.nas4free.org/ (also based on FeeeBSD; I don't recall how it distinguishes itself from FreeNAS) NAS4Free is a continuation of the m0n0wall-based FreeNAS 7. No comment about Open Filer. Never used it and I'd rather not have to deal with the RHEL/CentOS bloat if I have the choice. Regarding the tape-like system, I think that you'd be better off trying to adapt a tape system like Amanda. The vatpe (virtual tape) interface would be a good start. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On 1/25/2015 12:37 PM, Rohan Joshi wrote: Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. I have a pentium D, and 2 gb of memory to work with. TrueOS. It's a server-focused variant of PC-BSD which is a FreeBSD derivative intended to be easy to deploy, use and maintain. Also, any other suggestions of how to go about this are welcome. TrueOS. ZFS with mirrored storage disks. SMB or rsync/Unison or whatever gets your data onto the server. zfs send to copy snapshots to removable media for longer-term archival storage. You could use CentOS with ZFS on Linux but you would be saddled with a lot of bloat that you don't want on a small server. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
On 01/25/2015 12:37 PM, Rohan Joshi wrote: Hi all, I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and documents, preferably one that is scheduled. Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. I have a pentium D, and 2 gb of memory to work with. Also, any other suggestions of how to go about this are welcome. Recently Ubuntu has been annoying me. I was playing with some new package and I couldn't get the config to work, then I discovered that Ubuntu added their own new config--keeping the old one but ignoring it. I have concluded that Debian is less annoying. I might be wrong. -kb ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
For a desktop system, I'd go debian or ubuntu. For a server, I would seriously go CentOS. Hi all, I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and documents, preferably one that is scheduled. Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. I have a pentium D, and 2 gb of memory to work with. Also, any other suggestions of how to go about this are welcome. Thanks, Rohan -- Only a Sith deals in absolutes - Obi Wan Kenobi ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
FreeNAS is all of that and built for storage and file sharing with a web interface. -Original Message- From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+joe=polcari@blu.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pieri Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2015 1:58 PM To: discuss@blu.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] Home server On 1/25/2015 12:37 PM, Rohan Joshi wrote: Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. I have a pentium D, and 2 gb of memory to work with. TrueOS. It's a server-focused variant of PC-BSD which is a FreeBSD derivative intended to be easy to deploy, use and maintain. Also, any other suggestions of how to go about this are welcome. TrueOS. ZFS with mirrored storage disks. SMB or rsync/Unison or whatever gets your data onto the server. zfs send to copy snapshots to removable media for longer-term archival storage. You could use CentOS with ZFS on Linux but you would be saddled with a lot of bloat that you don't want on a small server. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
For what you want, any Linux distro should do it nicely. You don't even need a dedicated server for it if we are talking about periodically backing up things like photos. Depending on what you want to spend, A low cost NAS like WD My Cloud (about $150) should more than suffice. The reason for a separate server is to protect you from a massive disk failure caused by a lightning strike or power supply failure. I have used the older WD MyBook at work for backups. The device is slow, but reliable. On 01/25/2015 12:37 PM, Rohan Joshi wrote: Hi all, I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and documents, preferably one that is scheduled. Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this purpose. I have a pentium D, and 2 gb of memory to work with. Also, any other suggestions of how to go about this are welcome. Thanks, Rohan -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:B7F14F2F PGP Key fingerprint: D937 A424 4836 E052 2E1B 8DC6 24D7 000F B7F1 4F2F ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Home server
I did backups using Crashplan without their service. I ran it on a few machines at home (Win and Ubuntu, they also have a Mac client I have not used) and backed up to my 'server machine'. It is not open source, but free for personal use if not using their backup service. I even backed up friends machines to other friends machines (still secured) over the internet (not to mine because of lack of bandwidth). Can also backup to local drives (great for USB drives). Eventually I started using the Crashplan service, and it was super easy once I paid. But I still backup some things onsite, and other stuff offsite. Paid for version uses better encryption. It is easy to use (gui mainly). It is pretty good IMHO. I have been using it for several years. It installs and uses its own version of Java (so you don't have to do java separately) and takes care of updating its own software by itself. It does not do bare metal restores. You reinstall OS, software including Crashplan, then use it to restore other stuff. I have had to do it several times over the years on WIN and LIN system. I would use BackBlaze probably, but they don't have UNIX/Linux clients (even though there servers run on it!). ... No ties, just a satisfied customer. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
